They would ask me what actors I saw in the roles. I would tell them, and they’d say “Oh that’s interesting.” And that would be the end of it.
--Elmore Leonard, in 2000, on the extent of his input for Hollywood's adaptation of his novels

Thursday, February 8, 2018

C. M. Wendelboe's "The Marshal and the Moonshiner"

C. M. Wendelboe entered the law enforcement profession when he was discharged from the Marines as the Vietnam war was winding down.

In the 1970s, his career included assisting federal and tribal law enforcement agencies embroiled in conflicts with American Indian Movement activists in South Dakota.

Wendelboe moved to Gillette, Wyoming, and found his niche, where he remained a sheriff's deputy for more than 25 years. In addition, he was a longtime firearms instructor at the local college and within the community.

During his 38-year career in law enforcement he had served successful stints as police chief, policy adviser, and other supervisory roles for several agencies. Yet he always has felt most proud of "working the street." He was a patrol supervisor when he retired to pursue his true vocation as a fiction writer.

Here Wendelboe dreamcasts an adaptation of The Marshal and the Moonshiner, the first book in his Nelson Lane Frontier Mysteries series:

I frequently have actors in mind when I develop characters, only because it helps to keep me focused. In my recent novel, The Marshal and the Moonshiner, I envisioned John Goodman as my lead sleuth, Nelson Lane. Nelson is a middle-aged U. S. Marshal, a big, husky former Marine in WWI. When John Goodman portrayed Walter Sobchak in The Big Lebowski, he took scheming to a new level. And as “Big Dan” in O Brother, Where Art Thou, he depicted a ruthlessness while maintaining a dry sense of humor as he makes short work of Everett and Delmar, robbing and beating them. I can see Goodman bulling his way past moonshiners and bootleggers to get the information he wants.

“Compared to a novel, a film is like an economy pizza where there are no olives, no ham, no anchovies, no mushrooms, and all you’ve got is the dough.”
--Louis de Bernières, author of Captain Corelli’s Mandolin